There are two problems: (1) hardly any History of Art and Architecture people play competitive multiplayer games, which are far and away the gaming zeitgeist, (2) you can't be taken seriously in a History of Art and Architecture program taking a positivist or normatively-positive approach to video games.
There are a million interesting things you can say about architecture in video games! There are more people that can close their eyes and visualize the exact locations of the plants in Counter-Strike's Office map than there are people who can visualize any other building anywhere in the history of the world, other than their own homes. And it would be really interesting to just talk about the design of levels as spaces for killing in a fair way, as opposed to say, architecting a museum or a school.
860,000 - CS:GO
480,000 - DOTA 2
173,000 - Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer (Mostly a multiplayer GTA mod)
146,000 - Apex: Legends
130,000 - PubG
112,000 - Rust
93,500 - Destiny 2
88,400 - GTA V
76,000 - Rocket League
67,000 - R6:S
62,000 - Football Manager
I think it's pretty clear that competitive multiplayer games are the gaming zeitgeist (On the PC). Rust, Destiny 2, GTA V + mod, and Football Manager are the only titles in this list that are really played in a non-competitive manner.
Now, its true that in terms of copies sold, competitive multiplayer games are not quite as dominant.
Fortnite isn't really comparable to the list of top Steam games in my replies though.
Like Brawl Stars is also super popular, but it isn't exactly a "competitive multiplayer game" like dota. Most people play it casually without a huge care of W/L.
>taking a positivist [...] approach to video games.
As a member of the Positivist school of video game philosophy, I think that the only valid statements about videogames are those that can be reduced to empirical fact.
I may be running afoul of Poe's law here, but I'm going to take this essay at face value. The premise of the essay, from what I can tell, is that games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons are played by men and women who are fantasizing about being a little dictator over their own island which they control completely, because deep down they feel powerless and they can take their feelings of impotence out on the inhabitants of a virtual world. Or at least that these ideas are inextricably linked to such games.
To me, this is like saying that people who make paintings of landscapes that don't exist are repressed miniature autocrats, because, unsatisfied with the world as it is, they have the neocolonialist compulsion to bend the world around them to their wills, and they express this in art. It's also akin to saying that people play first-person shooters like Counter Strike because they fantasize about joining the army and conquering foreign lands to take them as their own. I'm sure Minecraft is probably political to people like this as well, because apparently "there is no such thing as an apolitical video game".
Stripped to their essentials, games like Animal Crossing are fundamentally about building. Humans like to build. There's nothing wrong with building things per se. I wonder at the unwillingness of some people to contemplate creativity without seeing politics, neocolonialism and oppression everywhere, _especially_ in virtual spaces where these real-world externalities specifically do not exist. You can shape an island without murdering and evicting indigenous peoples! You can build machines without having to think about whether you're destroying the planet, because you're not! Shouldn't these be what we strive to enjoy, instead of demonizing as neocolonialist and regressive? To say that "because others have destroyed to build means that portraying building _without_ also portraying destroying is bad" is patronizing and infantilizing, and belies a view of our fellow humans as being incapable of handling even slight nuance and complexity.
To be clear, I can see the value in comparing and contrasting something like Animal Crossing to real life, where, for example, they really did commit genocide to build the "New World". But saying that a work of art is infected by all the evil that anyone has ever done, or that independent concepts, like the history of colonialism and building a house on an island, cannot be separated is a road that leads to madness in my opinion.
To be sure, there probably really are, as the article describes, Riordanesque people who play these games, but saying that these messages are baked in to the media themselves is Quixotic. There are no enemies here to fight.
The author pretending like they can peer into the mind of the Platonic ideal Animal Crossing gamer to reveal their neocolonialist tendencies is, to be kind, an unsupportable line of thinking. As a person who has played these games myself, what else can I say but "No"?
You can tell that Clive Riordan, the villain in Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949), is a thwarted and disturbed person because he owns an elaborate model railway.
...
[In Animal Crossing] They could also pay a visit to ‘Joe’s Train Town’, a basement room featuring an array of model railway sets. This touch was presumably meant to evoke Biden’s old-fashioned decency and pioneer spirit, while expressing a vaguely greenish, vaguely leftish regard for mass-transit infrastructure; I took it as confirmation that anyone who aspires to be Commander in Chief must have a Riordanesque streak.
What? Biden famously commuted on Amtrak to work for decades. That's what this was meant to evoke. That the author is so out of touch as to assert this nonsense above does not really instill in me any confidence in their ability to analyze pop culture and its relationship to the real world.
This is indeed a big oversight and if the article had been proofread it might have held some merits, but reading and them skimming this is more an awkward collection of observations, loosely jointed by some similarities.
Came here specifically wanting to post these links! Seconding this recommendation; I've never come across a single content creator that manages to tie together so many disparate concepts into a cohesive whole the way Geller does. You can almost forget that architecture is one of his main themes because his analysis covers such a wide breadth of topics but manages to make them all relevant to his central theses.
"Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House" was the first one that grabbed my attention and was fantastic, will definitely work through the rest of these, thanks for the recommendation!
I felt the need to come back and comment again, I've watched all of these and have started digging into Jacob's other work, his channel is fantastic. Well researched, well written videos about all sorts of stuff, but really giving the "Are Games Art?" topic the kind of study, or at least reflection, it deserves.
I'm surprised this article didn't mention Worlds(.)com or even Second Life.
For those unaware, Worlds(.)com is an old virtual chat platform from 1995 that still exists today. I imagine it was a lot like VRChat back in the day in terms of its aesthetic and user experience, without the VR and with lower graphical fidelity. Its regulars today are, to put it lightly, very weird and sometimes unsettling people, but that's a topic for another time.
Worlds stands out in that many of its worlds are user-generated and still exist decades after they stopped being used. Exploring Worlds feels like you're exploring virtual ruins, where users made the kinds of worlds they would spend time on after work with fellow users.
You have virtual bars and clubs, virtual gardens, virtual BDSM dungeons, and even some secret areas. For example, there is a room only accessible by going behind a waterfall in another area, and it is a dark chamber with 2 floating roses in the middle, where Nights in White Satin plays. You get the sense someone made this for their partner. There is a "Hall of Fame" area with photos of the old users who spent time there, which prompted me to wonder how many of them were still alive.
The reason I was reminded of Worlds, outside of the obvious connection to the subject matter, is because of the article's idea of virtual space as a mechanism to experiment with identity. Worlds to me feels like a living, breathing, almost archaeological example of autobiographical virtual architecture.
24 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 64.1 ms ] threadThere are a million interesting things you can say about architecture in video games! There are more people that can close their eyes and visualize the exact locations of the plants in Counter-Strike's Office map than there are people who can visualize any other building anywhere in the history of the world, other than their own homes. And it would be really interesting to just talk about the design of levels as spaces for killing in a fair way, as opposed to say, architecting a museum or a school.
They're popular, sure. But honestly they don't appeal to many or most gamers.
Sorted by active users:
I think it's pretty clear that competitive multiplayer games are the gaming zeitgeist (On the PC). Rust, Destiny 2, GTA V + mod, and Football Manager are the only titles in this list that are really played in a non-competitive manner.Now, its true that in terms of copies sold, competitive multiplayer games are not quite as dominant.
Like Brawl Stars is also super popular, but it isn't exactly a "competitive multiplayer game" like dota. Most people play it casually without a huge care of W/L.
As a member of the Positivist school of video game philosophy, I think that the only valid statements about videogames are those that can be reduced to empirical fact.
I may be running afoul of Poe's law here, but I'm going to take this essay at face value. The premise of the essay, from what I can tell, is that games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons are played by men and women who are fantasizing about being a little dictator over their own island which they control completely, because deep down they feel powerless and they can take their feelings of impotence out on the inhabitants of a virtual world. Or at least that these ideas are inextricably linked to such games.
To me, this is like saying that people who make paintings of landscapes that don't exist are repressed miniature autocrats, because, unsatisfied with the world as it is, they have the neocolonialist compulsion to bend the world around them to their wills, and they express this in art. It's also akin to saying that people play first-person shooters like Counter Strike because they fantasize about joining the army and conquering foreign lands to take them as their own. I'm sure Minecraft is probably political to people like this as well, because apparently "there is no such thing as an apolitical video game".
Stripped to their essentials, games like Animal Crossing are fundamentally about building. Humans like to build. There's nothing wrong with building things per se. I wonder at the unwillingness of some people to contemplate creativity without seeing politics, neocolonialism and oppression everywhere, _especially_ in virtual spaces where these real-world externalities specifically do not exist. You can shape an island without murdering and evicting indigenous peoples! You can build machines without having to think about whether you're destroying the planet, because you're not! Shouldn't these be what we strive to enjoy, instead of demonizing as neocolonialist and regressive? To say that "because others have destroyed to build means that portraying building _without_ also portraying destroying is bad" is patronizing and infantilizing, and belies a view of our fellow humans as being incapable of handling even slight nuance and complexity.
To be clear, I can see the value in comparing and contrasting something like Animal Crossing to real life, where, for example, they really did commit genocide to build the "New World". But saying that a work of art is infected by all the evil that anyone has ever done, or that independent concepts, like the history of colonialism and building a house on an island, cannot be separated is a road that leads to madness in my opinion.
To be sure, there probably really are, as the article describes, Riordanesque people who play these games, but saying that these messages are baked in to the media themselves is Quixotic. There are no enemies here to fight.
The author pretending like they can peer into the mind of the Platonic ideal Animal Crossing gamer to reveal their neocolonialist tendencies is, to be kind, an unsupportable line of thinking. As a person who has played these games myself, what else can I say but "No"?
The core of this is that the author may have clocked 100 hours into Animal Crossing. Or maybe 0 hours.
Animal Crossing is fundamentally about getting out of debt.
Or the issues of how do you organize worlds where everyone can build so they're not a total mess. An important issue in architecture.
...
[In Animal Crossing] They could also pay a visit to ‘Joe’s Train Town’, a basement room featuring an array of model railway sets. This touch was presumably meant to evoke Biden’s old-fashioned decency and pioneer spirit, while expressing a vaguely greenish, vaguely leftish regard for mass-transit infrastructure; I took it as confirmation that anyone who aspires to be Commander in Chief must have a Riordanesque streak.
What? Biden famously commuted on Amtrak to work for decades. That's what this was meant to evoke. That the author is so out of touch as to assert this nonsense above does not really instill in me any confidence in their ability to analyze pop culture and its relationship to the real world.
Is the rest of the article this off base?
The Shape of Infinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm5Ogh_c0Ig
Games, Schools, and Worlds designed for Violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ
Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mexs39y0Imw
Gaming's Harshest Architecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkv6rVcKKg8
The Architecture of Fumito Ueda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLphTtVZfvw
For those unaware, Worlds(.)com is an old virtual chat platform from 1995 that still exists today. I imagine it was a lot like VRChat back in the day in terms of its aesthetic and user experience, without the VR and with lower graphical fidelity. Its regulars today are, to put it lightly, very weird and sometimes unsettling people, but that's a topic for another time.
Worlds stands out in that many of its worlds are user-generated and still exist decades after they stopped being used. Exploring Worlds feels like you're exploring virtual ruins, where users made the kinds of worlds they would spend time on after work with fellow users.
You have virtual bars and clubs, virtual gardens, virtual BDSM dungeons, and even some secret areas. For example, there is a room only accessible by going behind a waterfall in another area, and it is a dark chamber with 2 floating roses in the middle, where Nights in White Satin plays. You get the sense someone made this for their partner. There is a "Hall of Fame" area with photos of the old users who spent time there, which prompted me to wonder how many of them were still alive.
The reason I was reminded of Worlds, outside of the obvious connection to the subject matter, is because of the article's idea of virtual space as a mechanism to experiment with identity. Worlds to me feels like a living, breathing, almost archaeological example of autobiographical virtual architecture.